K.T Simpson
Michael Mann’s “Heat 2”, a novel that serves as both a prequel and sequel to the filmmaker’s 1996 film, will hit shelves August 9 from William Morrow. Mann wrote the book with Edgar-winner Meg Gardiner.
Per Deadline, the book “will tell an original story about the lives of the characters in that movie both before and after the events depicted in the movie.”
“It’s been my intention for a long time to do the further stories of Heat,” Mann told the outlet. “There was always a rich history or back-story about the events in these people’s lives before 1995 in Heat and projection of where their lives would take them after.”
The novel Heat 2 starts one day after the events of the film, with a wounded Chris Shiherlis [played by Val Kilmer in Heat] desperate to escape LA. The story moves to both the six years preceding the heist and the years immediately following it, featuring new characters and new worlds of high-end professional crime, with highly cinematic action sequences. The venues range from the streets of L.A. to the inner sanctums of rival Taiwanese crime syndicates in a South American free trade zone, to a massive drug cartel money-laundering operation just over the border in Mexico, and eventually to Southeast Asia. Heat 2 explores the dangerous workings of international criminal organizations with full-blooded portraits of its male and female inhabitants.
A key is a deep dive into the life of Hanna, six years earlier, in Chicago and signature cases that honed his skills. It includes the failing of his earlier marriage, the effects of his Marine Corp service in Vietnam and conflicts within the Chicago PD where he discovers his life’s calling – the pursuit of armed and dangerous felons into the dark and wild places that would doom his marriage in Heat. In Chicago, that included the hunt for a particularly vicious crime crew.
The book also covers the lives –six years before the bank heist — of master thieves McCauley and Shiherlis, whose character becomes central in the post-1995 world of Heat, as well as Charlene (Ashley Judd), Nate (Jon Voight), Trejo (Danny Trejo) and the wheelchair-bound Kelso (Tom Noonan), who provided the bank alarm schematics to McCauley in the film.
“The bank job was not the first time Kelso worked with McCauley, and not the last time he will work with Chris,” Mann revealed.
“When I was writing the film, it was imperative for me to create complete life stories about all the characters and to know everything about them,” Mann said, “including Neil McCauley’s early institutionalized years when he lost track of his brother, before he parachuted into the streets, young, angry and dangerous. And, the novel shows a McCauley very much attached and the dramatic events that resulted in his dictum that “if you’re making moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.”
— Michael Mann (@MichaelMann) January 19, 2022
